Blockchain-Based Secure Voting System with Real-Time Audit Trail

Abstract

Blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative force in digital security, with particular promise for enhancing the integrity and transparency of voting systems. This manuscript presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Blockchain-Based Secure Voting System with Real-Time Audit Trail. Leveraging a permissioned blockchain framework, the proposed system ensures that each vote is immutably recorded, cryptographically secured, and instantly verifiable by authorized auditors. The architecture integrates smart contracts to automate voter authentication, ballot casting, and result tallying, while a real-time audit trail module publishes anonymized vote hashes to an external monitoring dashboard.

A comprehensive simulation was conducted under varying network conditions and participant loads to assess system performance, scalability, and security properties. Statistical analysis of the simulation data—presented in Table 1—demonstrates that the system maintains end-to-end latency below 2 seconds per transaction, achieves 99.8% audit trail consistency, and scales linearly up to 10,000 simultaneous voters. Results indicate that the solution outperforms legacy electronic voting platforms in transparency, tamper-resistance, and auditability, without compromising usability. The manuscript concludes with recommendations for real-world deployment, potential limitations, and directions for future research.